The Visit

 1/8th of the story of a four year trip to Sundar PG, my college home.

It started nicely enough. I had two roommates and a bathtub in my room and attached bathroom. It was in fact better than I thought it would be. You see the paying guest accommodation I was living in was meant to be an apartment. It even had marble flooring, but this actually bothered me. In all the houses I have lived in for more than three weeks, there has been only one thinsg constant. I never realized it, but they all had the same kind of tile flooring. And it made the place seem familiar somehow.

So here I was in this decidedly alien place with weird floors.

The Roomies

Lets call my roommates D and R. D was a friend of mine from Bombay. She bagged a boyfriend in the first week of arriving, so she was out all day with him and came back only at night.

R’s family stayed in Bangalore, so for the first few days she visited her family occasionally. But as time passed her visit became longer and more frequent, till one day she never came back.

This wouldn’t have bothered me, but she was the one who had put curtains in our room and she took the curtains with her when she went.

The Food

The food was pretty good. But the landlady had some problem with cooks. It seems she had an uncontrollable urge to change the cook every few weeks. This would have been fine except for the fact that every new cook made spicier food than the last, so that at the end of four months you could identify anyone from Sundar PG by their scalded tongues.

The Roomies II

When R officially left the room, I ran to the room covering 3 kilometers in 17 seconds. This was because she had the best bed not only in our room but in all rooms.  I reached there huffing and panting, because all the oxygen had been squeezed out of my lungs. But I was too late. That’s how I got my new roommate De.

The Air

D and De are both smokers. They are mainly nicotine smokers but not exclusively. So, the once pure and fresh air around me gradually turned into heaven for passive smokers. This was probably good; I will never have a chance to miss the polluted air of Bombay.

The Roomies III

De is moving out. I love her and everything but I’m really looking forward to her moving out. The reason? Yup, it’s the bed. But sadly she’s moved out for all practical purposes, i.e. she is already living in another PG but her things remain here. This means that I miss her already, and I don’t get the bed.

The Bed

Why is the bed so special? It is right next to huge French windows. It is in a corner. It has convenient plug points. It has an extra bouncy mattress. And it’s awesome.

The Roomies IV

To be continued…